The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (69 page)

CHAPTER 4

Igor was not quite awake, and not quite asleep, but in a horrible, nightmarish in-between state in which white-coated men told him brightly that they had a new technique of questioning. They would crack his skull and run its contents through a new examining mechanism, with recording instruments noting down its findings. In that way they would end up by knowing every secret thought and word and action of his whole life. And they had strapped him into a frame which would crack his skull very carefully without injuring its contents—like cracking a nut without breaking the meat—and were having a refreshing cup of coffee before beginning. And Igor envied them that cup of coffee. It was becoming an obsession.

Then a tumult began which drove the dream or delirium away. He opened his eyes vaguely and heard a resonant uproar in the streets outside the place in which he was confined. Hundreds of loudspeakers were bellowing at once, all of them the same words and same voice in unison, but some were farther away than others, so that the fainter outcries of the distant speakers blurred the nearer words. It was very cold in Igor’s cell and he shivered and heard the monotonous uproar for a long time before he could quite realize what he heard.

The loudspeakers bellowed; “Citizens! Citizens! Citizens! All-Important Bulletin! Citizens! Citizens! Citizens! All-Important Bulletin!” Over the whole capital city the speakers barked, with a resonant and ghostly effect. Presently Igor got groggily to his feet and went to the barred window of his cell: There were pale, unwinking street-lights everywhere, shining upon empty ways. The houses of the enemy’s city were dark. The citizens had slept. There was a faint, grayish glow upon the rooftops, which was that of dawnlight yet an hour before the sun’s rising. It was somehow shocking to see that colorless luminosity, like fox-fire on the peaked roofs and empty paved streets where the street-lamps shone in emptiness and the loudspeakers barked monotonously, “Citizens! Citizens! Citizens!”

As Igor looked, though, lights winked on here and there. Such tumult would waken anybody. Sleepy householders stirred, and heard the rhythmic bellowings, and knew unease. A chilly hand of fear clutched at recently-snoring throats. Windows went up.

There was no other stirring, but in a little while the whole city was wide awake, shivering by open windows and waiting for what might come.

The voice stopped abruptly, and all over square miles of still-dark houses people in their night-clothes strained apprehensively to hear.

Then a new voice spoke sharply. Even the hollow, resonant timbre imparted by the distant repetitions did not hide an undertone of fury.

“Citizens! Within the past hour the meaning of the enemy’s threat against our soldiers has become clear! In twenty-eight separate places in the occupied territory, a new and deadly plague has broken out! Our soldiers, alone, are the victims! It is no disease ever before known to man! It is a disease created by the enemy in his laboratories to destroy our sons! It is sudden in its onset and terrible in its effect! It is the belief of the enemy that this unspeakably horrible plague will terrify our soldiers from the performance of their duty, and will make them flee from their posts, bringing the foul and filthy disease back to their homeland, where cities will become charnel-houses and the children who stand beside you as you listen will rot loathsomely before your eyes to putrescent corpses!”

Igor ceased to shiver. The professional radio announcer in him recognized that this was his specialty in action. He had planned broadcasts from the invaded province to rouse his countrymen to fury against the fact of surrender. This was a broadcast over a city-wide—perhaps nation-wide—loud-speaker system, for a purpose somewhat akin. It was not a news-bulletin but a propaganda speech. It posed as a newscast, but it was carefully written, with every word weighed for effect. The voice that snapped it out was filled with dramatic fury, not the thick rage of a man roused past reason by a crime. In short, it was a political trick. And Igor ground his teeth for what would follow, but already he knew that it was a lie.

“It is the most cowardly device that men have ever used in war!” raged the speakers to the empty streets. “Those who used it have forfeited the right to call themselves men! It is assassination! It is murder more loathsome and degraded than even our enemy has ever practiced before!”

Igor clenched his fists in hatred of the enemy which lied.

“But it has failed!” roared the announcer triumphantly. “In twenty-eight places the plague appeared simultaneously. Our soldiers were struck down by hundreds! All who were stricken died! But our medical corps rushed into action. Cordons about the centers of infection were instantly formed. Even the doomed soldiers aided in establishing barriers to prevent their contagion from reaching the well! And then, by one of those miracles of destiny which show that our nation is chosen by fate to greatness even beyond the past, by a miracle a medical officer suspected the bacterial type of the artificial plague, desperately tried an antibiotic discovered in our laboratory only two weeks ago—and the plague yielded! That medical officer is the nephew of our Premier-President! His genius enabled him to isolate the plague and stamp it out in the area under his supervision! Word was flashed instantly to the other points where the plague had been sown by our enemies! Already, within the hour, the crime which might have annihilated our nation has been foiled!”

There was silence. Igor found himself thinking cynically of the obvious lies in this broadcast. That an antibiotic only discovered two weeks before could have been tested, its properties discovered, adopted, a technique for mass production devised and put into operation, its product purified, standardized and issued to an army preparing for invasion. That a new disease could have developed, been diagnosed, treated, and recovery known to be a fact. And—of course—that it was the nephew of the Premier-President who had displayed such medical genius. Igor wanted to laugh, but he choked instead because of what he knew would come next. It came.

“This crime,” snapped the loudspeakers in a chorus which went to the horizon, “this crime shall not go unpunished! As I speak, our troops move forward! Our tanks, our ground-forces and our unsurpassable flying engines of destruction, now move upon the enemy to take vengeance for this murder of our stalwart sons! We shall destroy the hellish laboratories where this foul disease was spawned! We shall hang the criminals who ordered it used! And we shall wipe out forever from the list of nations the name of that country which was so base as to commit this loathsome deed! But our country, our fatherland, shall lie green and fair beneath the sun, safe in the valor of its sons against all the designs of all its enemies!”

Igor gulped, leaning on the windowsill behind the thick iron bars, while loudspeakers all over the dark city burst into a blaring of triumphant martial brass. He found himself sobbing, dry-throated, as a chorus of male voices burst into an exultant battle-song.

Igor wept for his country. It was a little nation, of barely five million souls. But he had loved it. Its small and ancient towns, its green fields, the great calm quietness of its sunny days, the smell of grass and the lowing of cattle and all the inconsequential little sounds that could not possibly be the same anywhere else, and now would be stilled forever.

Because, of course, the enemy army was on the march, now. This broadcast had been written and rehearsed and perhaps recorded days since. It was not new, not spontaneous, but deliberate. Undoubtedly it followed after the forward movement of the army, which meant that now the monstrous squadrons of flying things would be aloft in the still-gray dawn. They would be moving swiftly to drop destruction on the little towns that Igor remembered. The air-fleet would arrive with a roaring greater than any thunder. The jet-fighters would come first over Igor’s home city, and they would roar above it in the semi-darkness, and the searchlights and the few guns on the ground would strive valorously but vainly to shatter them. And when the batlike bombers came, in numbers great enough to deepen the darkness overhead, there would be thousands of pitiless white flares to float down beneath little parachutes so that the bombers could drop their ghastly cargos with a perfect precision.

There would be gigantic detonations on the ground, then, and houses would heave upward and settle back in smoking wreckage, with flames licking up and a cloud of thick dust over all. And the futile guns would fire on, desperately, and there would be voices screaming in the wreckage, and constantly more bombs and more bombs dropping to churn up chaos afresh.

And out in the open country, gray dawn light would show the ground army advancing as Igor had seen it advance over an undefended plain. When the invaders came to little homesteads their grins would spout fire. When they came to villages the monster tanks would crush horribly through them, shedding shattered beams from their snouts, and powdered plaster and sometimes there would be a struggling human figure to be crushed horribly beneath their treads. And the troop-carriers would come after, with nervously grinning, excited young soldiers to seize upon the debris of towns and cities, and their guns would spurt death at slight provocation or none, because they would feel like conquerors, and the young girls surviving in destruction would seem to them quite proper and very amusing prey.

When the door of his cell opened, Igor turned to face those who would come in for him. He was not quite sane, then. His face was a gray mask and his eyes burned such hatred as nobody should ever feel. Not ever.

But the men in the doorway were not triumphant. Their eyes were staring and frightened. There was a white-coated man, and a courier whose face twitched uncontrollably, and two of the orderlies in this place which should have been a hospital and was an inquisition instead. And there were four soldiers in the background.

“You!” panted the courier, his eyes panicky. “What did your people do to our army? What— Drag him!” he cried hysterically. “The Premier-President sends for him! Don’t let him commit suicide! Watch him closely.”

The soldiers pinioned Igor’s arms quickly. They were scared as they marched him out of his cell. And Igor was in the act of tensing his muscles for a maniacal, sudden outbreak in which no man could hold him—no man or number of men—when an insane cunning came to him. He was to be taken to the Premier-President of the country which had destroyed his own. He would pretend to be calm. To be resigned. And somehow, face to face with the man who dictated the enemy’s policy in all matters, somehow he would break free and kill—

He went with such docility that the elaborate precautions against his escape were absurd. It was all absurd, for that matter. He was clad in the shabby prison-pajamas they had put on him after taking away his clothes for examination in some faint hope of learning some secret from them. His feet were bare. He was unshaven and uncombed and disheveled. He followed docilely to the elevator, and he marched unresistingly down the marble-floored hall to the outer door, and the sharp chill of pre-dawn did not even make him flinch as he was hustled out to a waiting car.

That car hurtled into motion. It raced with frenzied speed through the empty, echoing streets. And his guards and the courier who commanded them were very silent. So were the loud-speakers, now. It did not occur to Igor, but that broadcast had been a blunder.

They reached a colossal government building. Again Igor in his shabby gray flannel pajamas and bare feet was bustled out and marched up icy-cold stone steps. Then there were sentries, and officers, and an elaborate ritual—but all the officers were gray with fear—and presently Igor was marched into a gigantic office with his arms still pinioned behind him.

The Premier-President looked at him coldly from behind his desk. The office was severe but magnificent. The Premier-President had an air of calm assurance that gave Igor no clue to the reason for his summoning. But Igor was obsessed, now. He maintained the composure of a madman awaiting his opportunity. Only, he felt the muscles of his arms and legs trembling ever so slightly. Not with fear, but in an enormous readiness. But he kept his hands lax, lest their clenching give some sign of his resolve.

“Ah! So you are the prisoner!” said the Premier-President acidly. “The only man my troops found in all the province which was surrendered to us! You were to set off the murder-devices, eh?”

Igor said—controlling his voice to keep the hate out of it—

“There were no murder-devices, to my knowledge.” The Premier-General sneered at him.

“Come! Come! You had a short-wave radio. There was some frequency which would set them off. You were to wait a chosen moment and violate all the laws of war by murdering troops which had accepted the surrender of your government.”

Igor was silent. He was still held fast. But a little longer, and a lightning-swift movement would free him for leaps toward that coldly mocking figure behind the desk.

“You have been treated leniently,” said the Premier-President in a suddenly soft voice. “You have merely been questioned. Do you know that if I order it you will be staked out here—yes, here in this room—and a tiny pencil-flame played over your body, inch by inch, while my doctors inject remedies to keep you alive so that you will live in screaming torment for days on end?”

Igor remembered to lick his lips, as if he were terrified. But he thought that his guards did not hold him quite as tightly as at the beginning.

“What is your government’s secret weapon?” asked the Premier-President softly. “I am in haste. For every minute you keep me waiting, you will spend what will seem a century begging for death.”